WHAT IS THE WHAT Dave EggersRead by Dion Graham (BBC Audiobooks America)Read Review

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Symphony Space has released several best-of collections of its popularSELECTED SHORTS series, also heard weekly on public radio, this year--short stories about food, about travel, about pets, about ordinary and extraordinary lives, written by the likes of T.C. Boyle, John Cheever, and Joan Didion and performed onstage at New York City's Symphony Space in front of a live audience by stage and screen luminaries such as Isaiah Sheffer, Dylan Baker, and David Strathairn. Recent anthologies include Pets!, Tales of Betrayal, Travel Tales, Family Matters, Food Fictions, and Wartime Lives.Read Review

In his marathon 60-hour narration of WAR AND PEACE, Neville Jason "gives a fresh and consistently insightful interpretation of the action, atmospheres, numberless characters, and author's apostrophes. An accompanying booklet, intended to help the listener keep characters and events straight, is unnecessary, thanks to Jason's skill." Add Naxos' elegant packaging of the two volumes, and you have a keepsake audio edition of Tolstoy's classic.Read Review

TOP 8 NONFICTION

THE ASSAULT ON REASON Al GoreRead by Will Patton (Penguin Audio/Books on Tape)Read Review

THE WORLD WITHOUT US Alan WeismanRead by Adam Grupper (Macmillan Audio/BBC Audiobooks America)Read Review

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The hugely successful INSPIRED BY . . . THE BIBLE EXPERIENCE: THE NEW TESTAMENT was a breakout audiobook: It garnered national press coverage, was named Audiobook of the Year by the Audio Publishers Association, and was so successful that the producers followed up with a 90-hour COMPLETE BIBLE. It's a fully dramatized aural kaleidoscope of music, sound effects, and a star-studded cast of more than 200 African-American actors, including Denzel Washington, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Samuel L. Jackson.Read Review

TOP 5 AUTHOR-READ

ABOUT ALICE Calvin TrillinRead by Calvin Trillin (Random House Audio/Books on Tape)Read Review

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE is a perfect example of how author-read audiobooks can be winners--Barbara Kingsolver, her husband, Steven Hopp, and their daughter, Camille, narrate their own sections of this memoir about their family's yearlong local food experiment. Add in the occasional background sounds of clucking chickens, and listeners are right there on the farm.Read Review

To correspond with the 30th anniversary of Alex Haley's Pulitzer Prize-winningROOTS, BBC Audiobooks America recorded an all-new unabridged audio version, narrated by Avery Brooks. As we noted in our review, "Being the consummate actor, Brooks has immersed himself into the role of narrator. In fact, it is difficult to describe what Avery Brooks does in this audiobook. He neither narrates nor performs, rather, he conjures. He brings the plethora of characters to life as memory, as history, as the pawns of diaspora." We hope this audio edition makes Haley's literary masterwork accessible to a whole new generation.Read Review

Scholastic Audiobooks' innovative audiobook adaptation of THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET includes a DVD of bonus material: a fully produced, filmed conversation with author Brian Selznick as well as his 284 illustrations from the print book. The result is a wholly original integration of audio narration, soundscapes, illustration, and author discussion.Read Review

Longtime team Lee Child and Dick Hill score another hit in BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE, the eleventh story in the Jack Reacher series. As we wrote in our feature, "Two-Part Harmony," about their author-narrator partnership, "Dick Hill loves being the voice of Reacher, a fearless one-man SWAT team whom he describes as a 'compelling character.' Hill's interpretation of Reacher is so convincing that Lee Child now hears it when he reads his work to himself. 'Dick's just got it, period,' he says. 'He connects.' And Child adds, 'I know for a fact that he has won me thousands of new fans.'" This latest collaboration should win them even more.Read Review

"If this isn't the best iteration of the long-running Will Patton/James Lee Burke audio collaboration, it has set the bar very high." Our review calls THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN "a stunning elegy to New Orleans and the physical and cultural losses suffered by all of south Louisiana from the devastations of Hurricane Katrina. Burke's novels read by Will Patton, as nearly a dozen have been, are perfect partnerships. Patton exquisitely captures the visceral and vivid prose style. He makes the crooks and psychopaths menacing and utterly frightening, and the descriptions of the bayou and the pecan trees lyrical and dazzling." Choose from the unabridged version or the well-crafted abridgment--even listeners who haven't followed the whole Robicheaux series will find this entry, with its New Orleans setting and compelling language and imagery, a superb starting point.Read Review